Oprah Winfrey: 50 Life and Business Lessons from Oprah Winfrey by George Ilian

Author:George Ilian [Ilian, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-02-28T04:30:00+00:00

Chapter 4: Business Empire

What I know is, is that if you do work that you love, and the work fulfils you, the rest will come.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah is acutely aware that she herself is a multi-billion dollar brand: people want to hear what she says and thinks, and she can capitalise on this, through endorsements and advertising, to make mega bucks. A single tweet from Oprah’s Twitter account, for example, is thought to have boosted Weight Watchers’ earnings by $150 million.

Lesson 26: Your brand, and that of your company, are intimately linked. You should therefore think about your personal and professional platforms as one and the same.

Although she is personally shrewd, she has also been very well advised throughout her career, enabling her to make the best business decisions. The fact that Forbes magazine currently estimates her net wealth at $3.1 billion, is testament to this fact. Unlike many of her wealthy peers, she has not inherited a cent, but made it entirely herself.

Lesson 27: The easiest way to become a millionaire is to inherit it. If you aren’t lucky enough to be in that position, however, you can still reach the same levels of wealth, it is just much harder work.

In Chapter 2: Television Career and Chapter 3: Other Media Projects, we have talked about the products Oprah has created, for film and television, publishing and radio, and online. In this chapter, then, we will look at the commercial vehicles which have enabled her to build her business empire, to promote herself on so many different platforms, and to capitalise, professional and financially, on all of them.

It is easy to think of Oprah as a talk show host, a celebrity, but she is a businesswoman first and foremost. Indeed, Nicole Aschoff, writing in The Guardian, went as far as to describe her as, “one of the world's best neoliberal capitalist thinkers.” Oprah embodies the American Dream, although, as Aschoff is at pains to point out, for most people:

[the American Dream] is a fiction. If all or most forms of social and cultural capital were equally valuable and accessible, we should see the effects of this in increased upward mobility and wealth created anew by new people in each generation rather than passed down and expanded from one generation to the next. The data do not demonstrate this upward mobility.

In any case, we still aspire to be like Oprah. Reality, however brutal, does not blunt our dreams, and a role model like Oprah - someone who has made it against all the odds - just makes us work harder to try and realise them.

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.

Oprah Winfrey

Lesson 28: The American Dream is, for most people, just a dream, something which they aspire towards, but will never reach. For a lucky few, however, that dream can become a reality.

Oprah’s business empire is managed, and expanded, by two companies, Harpo Productions, and the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).

Harpo Productions Founded in Chicago in 1986, Harpo Productions (the sole subsidiary of Harpo, Inc.

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